My brother and I are out plowing the secondaries the
morning after a big spring snowstorm--my brother in one
plow, me behind him in another, and I can see my brother is
going way too fast, and I think: If he doesn't watch out he
is going to hit something. And then he does not watch out
and does hit something. It is a woman. My brother keeps
going after he hits her, big flumes of snow curling and
fanning out to the sides of the plow, as he barrels down
Paines Hollow Road on the way to hitting something else. In
the eight years he's been plowing, my brother has hit cows,
parked cars, telephone poles, mailboxes, even other plows.
Usually, I don't even bother getting out of my plow to see
the thing he's hit. Usually, I just get him on the CB and
say: "You dumb son-of-a-bitch, you just hit another
Holstein," etc. Then we finish plowing and I hope he doesn't
hit anything else and ruin the plow blade, because it's my
snow-removal business and my brother has ruined plenty of
blades already, and believe me the blades are worth much
more than my brother.

But this is the first time he's hit a human being. So I
stop, get out of my plow, and go look for the woman. I find
her twenty feet into the field next to the road. She is
beautiful, lying there face up on a foot of wind-whipped
newly fallen snow, her long black hair spread out fan-like
beneath her, her cheeks apple red from the cold. The woman
doesn't look dead at all, no blood anywhere that I can see,
nothing severed or disfigured. I lean over her, put my ear
to her heart. I don't hear any heartbeat, but then again I
have my hat pulled down over my ears and she has on a heavy
down jacket and the plow is idling and rattling loudly
behind me.

So I take off my hat, unzip her jacket, and lean over
again to get a more definitive read on her heartbeat,
because suddenly I need to know whether she is dead
or alive. The woman is just so beautiful--lying there
peacefully, watching me with these perfectly round,
perfectly blue unblinking eyes--that I think I might
actually be falling in love with her, just like that, and if
so I need to know whether she is dead or alive,
because that will change the way I approach the situation,
obviously.

But then, leaning over her the way I am, I get this bad
memory of last Friday night. Last Friday night, I was out
late at the Renaissance, talking with my sister-in-law, who
also has black hair and rosy cheeks and who also is
beautiful. My sister-in-law was wearing this scooped-neck
sweater that exposed her white, jutting collarbone, which in
the light of the bar was a brilliant, precious thing,
something less like an actual collarbone and more like a
whalebone in its brilliance and its preciousness.
While my sister-in-law was telling me a story about her
job--she works as a bank teller--I was thinking: You cannot
stand there and just look at a whalebone, man, a
whalebone is a thing that needs to be cherished. So
right in the middle of my sister-in-law's story about
next-day-deposit-this and roll-of-quarters-that, I leaned
over and kissed her exposed collarbone.

I saw immediately that my sister-in-law had not taken my
kissing her collarbone in the spirit in which it was
intended. Her face got flaming red and she tightened her
hands into tiny fists and started beating them against the
sides of her legs.

"What in the hell do you think you're doing?" she
asked.

"Relax," I said. "You should feel honored."

"What are you talking about?"

And because I was desperate to communicate my meaning and
because I had been drinking beer for six straight hours, I
said, "Whalebone," and then leaned over to kiss her
collarbone again. Which was when she punched me smack in the
face. As I was staggering around, yelling for someone to get
me a napkin so I could stop my nose from bleeding all over
myself, my beer, the bar floor, my sister-in-law called my
wife from the bar pay phone and told her what I had
done.

The next morning, I woke up on the living room couch
where I had fallen asleep the night before. My wife was
standing over me, holding a suitcase in her left hand.

"You're still drunk, aren't you?" she asked me.

"Yes" I said.

"Whalebone," she said, and then swung the suitcase and
hit me square in the right ear, because this was not the
first time I had woken up on the couch, still drunk in the
morning; and it was not the first time I had kissed another
woman in a bar; and it was not even the first time I had
kissed my sister-in-law in a way that I shouldn't have. By
the time my right ear stopped ringing, my wife had started
the car and was on her way to stay with her sister.

I called my wife a few days later and tried to explain my
actions in the bar. "I imagined I actually was kissing a
whalebone," I told her. "I truly did."

"For someone who is so stupid," my wife said, "you sure
have an active imagination." Then she told me she was
leaving me for good, and hung up.

So here I am--no wife, no sister-in-law, no
nothing--leaning over the woman my brother hit with the
snowplow, and I ask myself: How does this look, me opening
this woman's jacket and leaning over her the way I am? It
looks bad, I know. The woman knows, too. Her eyes have
narrowed into a squint, as if to say: "We might have a good
thing going here. But I know men like you, always fucking up
a good thing by moving too fast. So tell me: are you going
to fuck this up?"

"No," I tell her. "I am going to do this right." I
zip up the woman's jacket and lie down in the snow next to
her. I even take hold of her hand and she does not try to
take it back and I think I see her eyes widen a little
bit.

We lie for there for quite a while. I admit to thinking
some dramatic thoughts. You cannot lie down on top of a foot
of virgin snow and look at the blazing blue sky while
holding hands with a woman you are quickly and totally
falling in love with, and not think of making a fresh start,
of wiping the dirty slate of your past clean, of forgiving
and forgetting. I start off by telling the woman that I
forgive her for all the pain she has caused me in our brief
time together. The only way in which she has caused me pain,
of course, is that she won't let me know, definitively,
whether she is dead or alive. But I tell her I don't
care.

She doesn't withdraw her hand or cough nervously, which
encourages me to launch into a whole series of true
confessions.

"You know the plow?" I ask her. "The one my brother hit
you with? It's stolen." I tell her how my brother and I were
in Ontario last January, and how we ended up in a bar,
drinking with the rightful owner of the plow. He was a good
old guy with a handlebar mustache who told us how he had
somehow grown attached to the plow as if it were an actual
human being, how he drove it everywhere in the winter, even
to the bar itself. After a few hours of drinking with us,
the old guy passed out. "We took the plow keys right out of
his pocket," I tell her. "My brother drove the plow home,
and I followed him in the car."

The woman narrows her eyes again. I know immediately that
she doesn't believe me. We're like that, she and I, we know
each other's thoughts. So I say, "It's true. The border
guard waved us right through. It was freezing. They were
waving everyone through. The other plow is mine, though,
legitimate."

Then, before she can stop me, I say, "And my brother
shouldn't even be driving the plow. It's no surprise he hit
you, I could see it coming. He's a menace. But I don't pay
him hardly anything and it makes me feel good, screwing him
that way. He lives with me, in my basement, and I charge him
too much rent and he pays it. That feels good, too. He's my
older brother and he teased me when we were kids and I still
hate him for it."

She doesn't say anything at all! The woman just lies
there calmly, circumspectly looking at the wide blue sky, as
if to say: I understand completely, tell me more, I want to
hear everything. As if to say: If this is going to work,
then we mustn't hide anything from each other. And so I tell
her everything. I tell her about the time a beer buddy and I
jumped this smart, skinny guy out at a party on Sabin Road
because he was too damn smart and because he was too skinny
to fight back much. We beat on him a little until my beer
buddy said: "Why are we doing this?"

I said, "Because he was talking bad about your sister,"
which I just thought of on the spot.

"No he didn't," my buddy said. "I don't even have
a sister." And so the buddy and the skinny guy beat the hell
out of me. But I don't tell the woman this last
part.

Instead, I go on and mention that time when I didn't go
to my father's funeral because my father had heard, months
before he died, that I had been running around on my wife.
He'd confronted me about it one Saturday morning, while we
were out deer hunting.

"You will not keep on hurting that girl the way you are,"
he said.

I said, "Mind your own business."

"Unfortunately," he said, "you are my business." Then my
father poked me in the chest with his twelve gauge.
Hard.

"It was humiliating," I tell the woman. "So I didn't go
to my father's funeral. Never been to his grave, either."
I'm still holding the woman's hand, but I don't look over at
her because of what I'm about say next, which is basically
that my father was right: that I did run around on my
wife and that I did hurt her, bad, for all ten years
we were together. I give the woman the whole, sordid story:
the cheating, the wrecked cars, the money stolen from my
wife's purse, the fantastic, sprawling lies. "I am a
vicious, immoral moron," I tell the woman. "That's a direct
quote from my wife." I don't spare my new love any little
detail about the complete piece of crud I was and mostly
still am.

When I am finally done it feels like hours have passed. I
look over at the woman, still lying next to me, still
holding my hand. I've blown it, I think, because the
woman's face is pale, very pale, and she is crying. The
tears are positively streaming down her cheeks.

"Please don't," I say. I reach over to wipe away her
tears and I find that they're not tears at all. It's merely
that there was some snow on her forehead, and it is now
melting in the sun. Now that I realize this, the woman
appears to be in fact quite happy. She even looks to be
smiling, the corners of her mouth rising slightly in playful
disbelief, as if to say: "There must be more. Come on. You
haven't done anything worse than that?"

"That's it," I say, getting happier and happier and
deeper in love and deeper in love. I don't think I've ever
been this content, not even when my brother and I were
drinking beer this very morning, right before we took the
plows out, which makes me remember one more thing I need to
confess.

"I'm a drunk!" I tell her. "I'm drunk right now!"

The woman continues to smile. "Is that really it?" seems
to be her response.

"It is," I tell her and then relax more completely into
the snow, which is soft and melting in the sun and feels
like wet foam rubber. Never in my life have I been so
whole. I actually feel saved, religiously saved.
"Where did you come from?" I ask her. "You're some kind of
angel, aren't you?"

And then I wonder: Where did she come from? And then I
think that she actually might be an angel, because the field
we're lying in is in the absolute middle of nowhere. There
are no houses nearby and there is no car anywhere that she
might have driven here in. The idea that the woman is an
angel suddenly makes utter, perfect sense: how would she
have gotten here if she weren't? "Wow," I say, because it's
disconcerting falling in love with an actual angel, because
that means that you haven't chosen her, but that
you've been chosen. And when you've been chosen by an
angel, you must sit up straight and act nobly and do
good.

I sit up straight with the thought of having to do good,
and in doing so I see something sticking out of the snow a
few feet away from us. I get up to investigate and I find
one cross-country ski, then another one a few feet away.

So she is not an angel after all. She's a cross-country
skier. I'm disappointed at first, understandably, but then I
have this really fantastic idea. The Olympic Training Center
at Lake Placid is not far away from here, and I know it's an
Olympic year. It occurs to me that the woman is an Olympic
skier and that she was out training for the 50K race or the
Nordic Combined when my brother hit her with his plow.

I gather up the skis and trudge back to the woman. "You
didn't tell me you were going to be in the Olympics," I
say.

She still has that sly, modest smile frozen on her face.
Clearly she didn't want to tell me, didn't want to me to
think she was showing off. Clearly she wanted to get to know
me first before she confessed to being an Olympic
athlete.

"I am so proud of you," I say. "It's just wonderful." And
it is. I can see our whole life in front of us. I will give
up the plow and my sorry brother and our crappy hometown and
my sordid, lonely life, and follow her to Squaw Valley,
Oslo, Lillehammer. I will wax her skis and get her lucrative
endorsement deals and give her backrubs and menace her
competitors if I have to. Then, once I have proven my
devotion and my love, I will divorce my wife, marry this
woman, and finally find some happiness in this world.

I am so excited by this idea that I am about ready to
load this woman and her skis into my plow and begin our new
life together when the sun hits me in the eyes, right in the
eyes where it shouldn't this early in the morning right
smack in the middle of winter. Then I remember that it is
not right smack in the middle of winter. It is the first
week in April. And aren't the winter Olympics in February or
something?

"Hold on a second," I say to the woman. I run over to my
plow and get my brother on the CB.

"I'm already back at the garage," my brother says. "Where
the hell are you?"

"You hit a woman," I say.

"Did not," he says.

"Never mind," I say. "Listen. When are the winter
Olympics this year?"

"There are no winter Olympics this year," he tells
me. "The summer Olympics are in Atlanta. They start in
July."

"Goddamn it," I say. I slam the CB against the
dashboard, because the woman has obviously lied to me about
being an Olympic skier. She is not an Olympic skier at all;
she is only an ordinary, amateur skier who was trying to
cross the road when she shouldn't have. Here I have shown
her my true black heart, pledged myself to her, made big
plans for us, and what do I get? I get lies. And if the
woman has lied about being in the Olympics, then who knows
what other lies she has told? Who knows what lies she might
yet tell?

I am so angry that I come close to running over there and
just letting her have it. I am no stranger to ugly
break-ups. I know how to make a woman miserable. I know how
to ruin her name, her reputation. I know how to pour sugar
in a woman's gas tank. I know how to do lots of things.

But I don't do any of this stuff because I am thinking
clearly now, much more clearly than normal. It occurs to me
that if this woman can so easily let loose with this big
whopper of a lie, then who knows what kind of truly twisted
stuff she might be capable of. You can never tell about
people these days. I suddenly have a vision of us, ten years
or so down the road from now. I am lying on the couch and
this woman is standing over me with a suitcase. And since
she is a lunatic, an absolute sick fuck, then the
suitcase is packed with rocks or cinder blocks and she is
about to smash me in the ear with it, just like my wife. And
you know I don't need that again.

This premonition changes my way of thinking completely
and I start backing away from the woman because--and this
seems obvious to me now--I am absolutely afraid of her, just
as I'm afraid of my father and my wife and her sister, just
as I'm afraid of anyone in this world who doesn't take any
shit. I am such a coward that I almost start running
away.

But I don't run away. Easy now, I tell myself,
just calm down, because while it's imperative that I
get rid of this woman, I certainly do not want to spook her
in the process. I have been through a few court-ordered
rage-management and alcohol-awareness seminars, and so I
know a little something about trying to defuse potentially
dangerous situations. I suck in a deep breath and take the
long generous view of this woman. True, she has lied to me.
True, she doesn't deserve the affections of a man like me.
But after all we did have something special, and I will not
ruin the memory of our time together by being ugly now. I
will dump her respectfully, like a gentleman. Then, once I
have dumped the woman, I will get in my plow and head back
to the garage. My brother will be there, drinking beer, and
I will drink his beer and dock him a day's pay for ruining
another plow blade.

Just the thought of me sticking it to my brother makes me
feel very brave indeed. I even forget why I was scared of
the woman in the first place. So I walk over to where she is
lying in the snow. She is still smiling; she obviously still
has high hopes for me and her, and it actually pains me when
I tell her that it's over between us. But I know it's the
right thing to do.

"Don't," I say before she can try to talk me out of it.
"What we had was beautiful, but fleeting. Let us not have
any illusions. We are in love now, but in ten years you
would hate me."